After a successful West End run The Kite Runner returns home to Nottingham. It’s as good as ever.

Concerned as it is with friendship and love, class and ethnicity, betrayal, guilt and redemption, the play still has all the narrative thrust and grandeur, and power to move and satisfy, as one of those hefty Victorian novels.

Set chiefly in Afghanistan and later in America, it covers a thirty-year time span, with riches to rags, dangerous journeys, immigration, romantic love, domineering fathers; and finally, a major revelation about the past involving sex.

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A functional, stylised set and well-used back projection and lighting are visually compelling. And Hanif Khan sits at the side of the stage helping to establish atmosphere on a brilliantly played tabla.

Protagonist and narrator – like many book adaptations this is a tad over-dependent on narrative – Amir, is acted man and boy by David Ahmad in a fine performance.

(Image: IRINA CHIRA)

He and bosom friend Hassan (Jo Ben Ayed), the kite runner of the title, enjoy John Wayne films as well as kite flying.

Emilio Doorgasingh is splendid as Amir’s widower father, Baba, a westernised Scotch-drinking businessman. The relationship between him and aesthete Amir is crucial to the play. He thinks his son is effeminate.

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And it’s a nice bit of dramatic irony – at this point it’s the 1970s – when he hopes the religious bigots, those “self-righteous monkeys”, never get to rule the country.

Towards the end there’s a short but sad lapse into melodrama. But a rich variety of scenes include a one-way fight between Amir and Assef (Bhavin Bhat), a vicious child rapist, and the arrival of father and son in laid back San Francisco – utterly different from the Kabul they’ve left behind.

Again directed by Giles Croft, this is clearly one of the best things he’s done at the Playhouse.